things that are making me happy today

Yesterday a box of goodies arrived from my secret pal. Now I want to go to Finland, because clearly they make awesome things there. Thank you secret pal – I love everything Also loving the project spectruminess of this package, was it intentional?

I had the sense to knit one sleeve of the Posie cardigan, block it and sew it together before making another one. Luckily I didn’t need to rip anything out, but I’m pretty pleased with my smartness (surprisingly unusual).

The second sleeve is almost done now too. And then I just need to do all the finishing. As you’ve probably noticed I’m generally a fan of avoiding finishing, but knitting this in pieces seemed like the best option – more on my reasoning in another post.
It looks like I’ll be continuing the pink and green thing long past May, I started something new green, but maybe I’ll try something black and red too.

Today I mustered some motivation and now my livingroom / studio is tidy and my bedroom is spotlessly clean. Remembering why I fell in love with my flat so much in the frist place and looking forward to making it even cuter.

The sky has been crazy today. Around 5pm I sat and watched a thunderstorm while I knit. I love thunderstorms so much, but we get them far, far too rarely. It made me want to go to an Italian lake where the thunder bounces around the mountains for hours. And now everything is clearer and the edges of the clouds are golden.

Short stories, lately I’ve been reading Katherine Mansfield. I remembered that I’d been meaning to read her since we studied modernism in 2nd year and the course ignored so many female writers. My tutor was from New Zealand and suggested I read her. I love her writing, but the Oxford selected stories, not so much. I only managed to read a few pages of the intro – so maybe it gets better but what’s really irritating is the volume of pointless annotations. Half of them are just attempting to replace a dictionary, and they translate every word of French, even when it’s been completely assimilated into standard English. It might just be me, but if I see that there’s a note I tend to look at it, because it might be interesting. These notes are very dissapointing and frustrating my curiosity. The great thing about finishing my degree seems to be that now I get to read the books I’ve been meaning to for a long time. I’m looking forward to reading A. M. Homes’ and Miranda July’s new collections, and I have an anthology of American short stories to read but what do you recommend? Who are your favourite short story writers, your favourite collections or anthologies or even your favourite stories? And if you think you don’t like short stories as much as novels, I do think they are often underrated. I love the way short fiction forces you to read attentively.

Thank you to everyone who already commented on the pictures in this post over on flickr. Those made me happy too. I uploaded them yesterday to blog, but then I checked my phone and realised I had to go to uni and find out my degree classification. And the thing that is making me happiest today – somehow I actually got a first. I am so proud of myself, it was pretty unexpected, but apparently being a studying hermit for the last few months was worth it.

Edit – it occurred to me that you might have no idea what I’m talking about depending on where you’re from. So here’s Wikipedia on how British degrees work
– if you’re really curious about the Scottish system of 4 year degrees, there’s a master of arts article too.

Also in Blog

Eight weeks ago, as school closures were announced here in the UK, we made the decision to pause shipping physical goods until we'd had time to take stock and figure out how to continue. After a week or so we came back with a plan: to do a small update every Monday, cycling through our stock so that only a limited range would be available each week.

Congratulations to our Glenmore KAL prize winners! If you're still working on your Glenmore this blog series will stay up, so you can refer back to the tutorial for any section as you knit at your own pace. For inspiration and motivation check out all the lovely Glenmore projects here.